jumping out of bulidings

[erinmoran]

As youve seen, people jumped from the Trade Towers to escape the fire and smoke. They obviously jumped to there deaths. I have two questions.

Is it possible to survive a fall from that height?

What happens to the body while falling and landing?

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[HordeKing1]

ERINMORAN - I had to research this. To my surprise I was able to find very little reliable information.

From what I was able to piece together, the old axiom, "It's not the fall that kills you it's the landing" appears to be true to large extent.

In physics a moving object has kinetic energy. This energy can't just dissapear, it has to go someplace. When a car stops (without crashing), the brakes absorb the energy by converting it to heat. In contrast, when a car crashes, the kinetic energy is expressed all at once, not by heating but by "crushing, tearing and twisting the vehicle" and in turn "exerting tremendous forces on the vehicle's occupants."

It's not a big leap to apply this principle to a person jumping out of a building.

Does anyone know the maximum height a person has fallen and lived? If so, do you know to what extent the person was injured?

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